Scripture: Genesis 1:1-2:7.
I decided to focus my sermons during the months of July and August on some of the stories and characters from the Book of Genesis. I don’t have any particular reason for choosing to do this…except that these sermons will be a little different in style from what I have been doing so far at Sojourners. Up to now I have taken my topics for preaching from various places, but not directly from the Bible. While the Bible has formed a background and a framework for all these sermons, I have not just taken some scriptural passages and explored what they may have to say to us. So I thought I would do that for several weeks running this summer, and for better or worse I decided to do that by going back to the beginning, the book of Genesis, and for this morning going back to the first chapters of Genesis, the first words of the Bible.
I’m doing this with some eagerness and enthusiasm, but also, I have to admit, with some reluctance and wariness. If you’re going to take a Bible passage and ask what it may be saying to you, right now at this moment, then it’s important as much as possible to approach it with an open mind, not sort of already knowing what the passage is supposed to be saying to you, what you think you remember from Sunday school or with other preconceptions about what the passage means. In the case of these first chapters from Genesis, I’m afraid it’s hard—it’s hard for me anyway—to approach the reading with an open mind and spirit.
There has been just so much discussion and debate, some of it mean-spirited, that has centered on these chapters. To read them is to be confronted with all sorts of issues and to be challenged almost to take a stand.
Does the Bible give a more accurate description of how the world and life came to be than Darwinian evolution? Where do you stand?
Should school districts allow a Biblically based theory of creation to be taught alongside of evolution? Where do you stand?
Is there a fundamental conflict between science and religion? Where do you stand?
Are the creation stories in the Bible just that, stories very much like the creation myths we find in almost all other cultures, or is our story different…and better? Where do you stand?
Do we recognize that there are not one but two stories of creation in the Bible that were the product of two different traditions, written down by different people in different places…or do we think that there is only one author who counts and that is God? Where do we stand?
People have fought bitterly about these questions, and others like them. Christians have fought against non-Christians. Christians have fought against Christians. How you answered questions like these have determined whether some Christians considered other Christians, Christians. How some people answered those questions has in some times and places gotten them arrested. It has got other people kicked out of office, kicked out of their job or out of their church. People are still fighting about these questions. And how you answer them determines which side you will be fighting on in what some people are calling the culture wars being fought in America today.
These are all issues I have dealt with before, many times. In sermons, in teaching with college students, confirmation students, Bible classes. I know where I stand on most of these issues. And you probably do too, pretty much, even though I haven’t told you. But thinking about this sermon, I had to ask myself: Do I really want to go there again? And the answer was no.
There are a lot of issues here—religious issues, political issues—some of them important issues, some of them issues I’m willing to fight about—but for the most part those issues aren’t speaking to me today. And I didn’t want to use the sermon just as an opportunity to strike one more blow in the culture wars, to hurl a grenade from the liberal camp out in the general direction of the conservative camp.
So it has been my hope and desire to somehow get past all the arguments that go on around the creation stories, to put aside all the debating points, all the choosing up sides, and try as best I can to approach the scripture without too much baggage and see where it leads me. That would be the exciting part for me.
I have to warn you though. Of course, by now I know what I have ended up saying in this sermon, and I suppose it’s not good form to apologize for a sermon ahead of time, but we don’t worry too much about form or formalities around here, and I need to tell you, that I don’t feel like this sermon is very well structured. And that’s likely to be the case, if you approach a Bible passage without an outline of what you want to say already in your head—or even a fixed idea of what you want to talk about. When you approach scripture with an open mind, what you’re likely to come up with is not so much a sermon as just several fairly undeveloped trains of thoughts, which is the way I feel about this sermon.
That said, what I began with was a memory. A memory of hearing Paul Robeson read, on a record, a poem by the great black poet, James Weldon Johnson. It was a poem from his collection called God’s Trombones and I want to try to read it for you:
And God stepped out on space,
And He looked around and said:
I’m lonely—
I’ll make me a world.
And as far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.
Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said, “That’s good.”
Then God reached out and took the light in his hands,
And God rolled the light around in his hands,
Until he made the sun.
And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.
And the light that was left from making the sun
God gathered it up in a shining ball
And flung it against the darkness,
Spangling the night with the moon and the stars.
Then down between
The darkness and the light
He hurled the world;
And God said: “That’s good.”
Then God himself stepped down—
And the sun was on his right hand,
And the moon was on his left;
And the stars were clustered about His head,
And the earth was under His feet.
And God walked, and where He trod
His footsteps hollowed the valleys out
And bulged the mountains up.
Then He stopped and looked and saw
That the earth was hot and barren.
So God stepped over to the edge of the world
And he spat out the seven seas—
He batted his eyes and the lightnings flashed—
He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled—
And the waters above the earth came down,
The cooling waters came down.
Then the green grass sprouted,
And the little red flowers blossomed,
The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,
And the oak spread out its arms,
The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,
The rivers ran down to the sea.
And God smiled again, and the rainbow appeared,
And curled itself around His shoulder.
Then God raised His arm and He waved his hand
Over the sea and over the land,
And He said: “Bring forth; bring forth!”
And quicker than God could drop His hand,
Fishes and fowls
And beasts and birds
Swam the rivers and the seas,
Roamed the forests and the woods, and split the air with their wings.
And God said: “That’s good.”
Then God walked around,
And God looked around
On all that He had made.
He looked at His sun,
And He looked at His moon,
And he looked at His little stars;
He looked on His world
With all its living things,
And God said: “I’m lonely still.”
Then God sat down—
On the side of a hill where He could think;
By a deep, wide river He sat down;
With His head in his hands,
God thought, and thought,
Till He thought: ”I’ll make me a man!”
Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled Him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image;
Then into it He blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.
What James Weldon Johnson found in the opening chapters of Genesis was a poem. And it struck me, as I recalled that poem, that that is what I am looking for in those first words of the Bible—poetry—and, that that is what I am missing in most of the discussions and debates over the issues relating to the Genesis creation stories. It’s true for me that scientific descriptions of how the world came to be and how we came to be can be, don’t have to be but can be, rather unpoetic. But replacing them with a very literal or rationalistic reading of Genesis leaves us, leaves me anyway, worse off rather than better.
What I am looking for—and why I remembered the poem by James Weldon Johnson, I think—is a sense of the poetic within the scripture. This is not so much a question of the culture wars going on out there. Those who seem to be attacking scripture and those who think they are defending the Bible, those who claim to take the bible literally and those who do not, those who assert the absolute authority of the bible and those who treat it as just another book, all these people can be equally non-poetic in the way they approach the Bible. This is not so much a culture war going on out there, as it is a kind of culture war going on within me.
I can read the opening chapters of Genesis in a kind of mechanical way: on the first day God did this, and the second day, etc., etc. God said, “Let there be…” and there was, and all this can be rather routine and ritualistic. Or I can focus on what are for me much more poetic images, just images, not lessons with points to them, not statements of doctrine, not philosophical discussions, just images—like the image of God bending down over a lump of clay, like a mammy bending over her baby, or like the image of a wind blowing over the face of the sea…or maybe instead of the image of a God who speaks and makes things happen like a king or a general, more the image of a god who speaks things into existence, almost like breathing something into existence. God didn’t say “let there be light”. God said………..and there was light, so that everything in the whole universe comes from the inside of God, maybe is the inside of God.
Anyway, one of the things I mean by poetry is words that in a way lead us away from words, words that lead us to a sense of wonder, words that lead us toward what is unsayable about our lives, words that point toward what words cannot express. Genesis challenges us, challenges me, to make a choice about how I am going to read those words, whether in a matter of fact, rational, dogmatic sort of way, or in a way that will lead me to lose myself in the wonder that is God.
I will go a step farther. It is not just a question of whether we look for, and are able to find, poetry in the book of Genesis. It is also and much more a question of whether we are looking for and are able to find poetry in our lives.
That’s where Genesis leads me this time around. As I read those first couple of chapters and react and respond and reflect, what I feel like those words are saying to me is “find the poetry in these words”. And then as I reflect more on that, I find that I am not just thinking about scripture but thinking about me, my life, our lives. And suddenly I am asking not just where do I find the poetry in Genesis, but where is the poetry in my life.
The book of Genesis is not about exactly what God did and when God did it. How uninteresting and “factual” that would be. Genesis chapter one is about something much more mysterious than that. And in like manner our lives are not simply a series of things to do and places to go until we have used up all our things to do and places to go. Our lives are much more mysterious, more poetic than that, if we have the gift of being able to see them in this way. What are those things in our lives that don’t necessarily have a point, that don’t need a point, an excuse, a reason, an explanation? What are those things that are not necessarily useful or reasonable but that point us in the direction of wonder, and maybe of God?
It’s not just a question of poetry after all. It’s also a question of God. Another way of putting the question Genesis asks us might be: Is God in this picture? This picture of the beginning of things, is God in it? That is the fundamental question, isn’t it? That’s what’s bothering the people who are so upset about evolution and who want to defend the Genesis account of creation. The details in the end aren’t so important. The question is, “Is God in this picture?” Genesis of course says yes, God is in the picture. But it also invites questions, not just gives answers.
The question again is not just about Genesis or about theories of creation. The crucial question is not whether God is in this picture (Bible) but whether God is in this picture (us). And that is not a question we should answer easily, as though there were no difficulties with it, as though there is no mystery about it. And it is not a question to ask in a kind of moralistic tone as though to say, “Well, if God isn’t in the picture for you, then you ought to put God there real quick.” Genesis is not there to hit us over the head with God, to come at us with threats or judgments.
My vacation reading included a book called “The Fall of a Sparrow”, which is based I think on a real event where a right wing terrorist bombed a train station in Italy and killed 86 people. The main character in the book is the father of a young woman killed in the explosion, and the book is about how he deals with it, which is not well. Part of the story is that his wife, soon to be his ex-wife, wants an inscription on the tombstone to read: “In God’s will, is our peace.” The husband, the main character, absolutely refuses to allow this saying to be set in stone. That is the easy and maybe the orthodox thing to say, that it must have been God’s will. But it is not the truth. It was not God’s will. If God is going to be in this picture, it must be in some other way than that. It’s just that it’s not clear what that way is. It’s not clear how God is in the picture. And by the book’s end it is still not clear, although the easy and phony answers have been rejected.
Is God in the picture? The problem in answering this question is not with God, not with the Bible, but with us. The problem is with a world that is sometimes too profane even to allow for poetry, even to allow for pretty words, much less for easy assurances about the presence of God. The problem sometimes is with us, being able to see ourselves as creatures carrying within us the breath of God. The mud part, for some people, is easy, all too easy. The God part, often, is not. Seeing the God part of ourselves often is not easy at all.
Sometimes the answer to the question of whether God is in this picture does come fairly easy. We can describe our sense of God’s presence with words that may not be totally adequate but that are nonetheless true. This is how I see God in my life.
But sometimes we have no words. Sometimes we fall back on silences. Maybe in those moments of silence which many of us treasure when we use them for worship, maybe in those moments of silence we are reaching out for that God who was before there were any words, even God’s own, whose spirit moved over the face of the deep in the time before time, whose spirit moves over the restless sea of my inner life, who invisibly and mysteriously breathed into my flesh and bones whatever that something is that makes me a living soul. There is a point in our relationship to God where words will fail us. But beyond the words there is silence. And beyond the silence, there is God. In the beginning, brooding, breathing, bringing forth. And even now beyond the silence, within the silence, there is God, brooding over me, bending over me, like a mammy bending over her baby. Mothering God, you gave me birth. Mothering God, you give me life. Amen.
Jim Bundy
July 9, 2000